alt Hacker NewsYou're missing two things from the whole picture: 1. Cloud mode works without local network access, so their server is involved in the transit of the data to the printer. This is pretty minor, but still within their rights to preserve. 2. For printing from the app, they actually run the computationally expensive slicing algorithm on their servers, so this is totally reasonable to protect.
But in this case the users want to use those features locally and are being blocked. Using a resource constraint argument doesn't make sense for it.
It seems more likely they want it as a revenue source at some point.